Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

[John Clark]

 I haven't yet read the book "Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley" by Jacob Silverman but after reading the following brief book review by Brian Harrod I intend to: 

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He raged after his tweets flopped... "I have 100 million followers, and only getting thousands of impressions", ElonMusk axed an X engineer after they delivered the harsh truth about why his posts were flopping, a new book claims. Journalist Jacob Silverman revealed in his book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley that Musk became fixated on how people interacted with his posts following his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

“Firing more than half of Twitter employees, Musk transformed how the platform operated,” Silverman writes in an excerpt obtained by Newsweek about the mass layoffs that occurred after the tech billionaire’s 2022 Twitter takeover. Silverman then details a 2023 firing reported at the time by the tech news site Platformer.
“He fired a company engineer who told him that engagement on his tweets was down because people weren’t as interested in him,” Silverman writes. The original report described how Musk gathered engineers and advisers at Twitter’s headquarters in 2023, where multiple sources recalled him saying: “This is ridiculous... I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

“One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach,” Platformer reported, withholding the engineer’s name due to the harassment Musk directed at former employees. According to the publication, employees presented Musk with internal data and a Google Trends chart showing his popularity had fallen from a peak score of 100 to just nine. Musk then reportedly told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”

In his new book, Silverman cites an example—also reported at the time by Platformer—recounting the 2023 Super Bowl, when both then-President Joe Biden and Musk tweeted their support for the Philadelphia Eagles, with Biden’s post generating nearly 20 million more impressions. “That apparently was unacceptable to Musk, who deleted his tweet and flew to California after the game to demand changes to Twitter’s algorithm,” Silverman writes. Silverman then quotes an alleged 2:36 a.m. Slack message from Musk’s cousin James Musk after the Super Bowl fiasco, which read: “We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

“Thanks to the middle-of-the-night participation of 80 company engineers, the ‘high urgency’ issue was quickly solved,” Silverman writes, detailing the changes made that ensured “Twitter’s systems to privilege Musk’s posts above all others. The For You feed became a mirror of Musk’s interests, containing the right-wing accounts he followed,” . The author of the original Platformer article, which detailed the operation to change the X (formerly Twitter) algorithm, had been called out by Musk on X following its publication

Musk Axed X Engineer After Truth About His Poor-Performing Posts

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

No wonder Trump embraced him as a fellow egotist...and no wonder they had a falling out.  It's kind of amazing how self-unaware billionaires can be.

Brent

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[Giulio Prisco]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 1:30 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I haven't yet read the book "Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley" by Jacob Silverman but after reading the following brief book review by Brian Harrod I intend to:

Interesting. Downloaded the book, will read.

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[John Clark]

By the way, He Who Must Not Be Named just imposed an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff on Canada, even though it was already sky high, for the crime of ACCURATELY quoting a Ronald Reagan speech in which he made it very clear that he thought tariffs were a very bad idea.

John K Clark 

[Brent Meeker]

I hope a D congress will not be so completely spineless.  The President has no authority to set any tariff.

Brent

On 10/26/2025 5:22 AM, John Clark wrote:

By the way, He Who Must Not Be Named just imposed an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff on Canada, even though it was already sky high, for the crime of ACCURATELY quoting a Ronald Reagan speech in which he made it very clear that he thought tariffs were a very bad idea.

John K Clark 

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